In this blog post I share some observations from the pilot mentioned in blog post seventy-three (the regional Interdemocracy pilot). The observations are about the actual facilitation of the sessions, and the epistemic attitudes of the students. I will share more in future posts.
The facilitation
The facilitators were parents of the students. This seems like a good choice: it puts the facilitator in the same social world as the participants. The facilitators approached the sessions very carefully, as if they were aware that their role was to maintain a fragile balance between structure and openness.
The facilitation is a constant balancing act: too much guidance becomes instruction; too little guidance becomes chaos. The structured, non-judgmental, dynamic specification makes it possible for the group to open up, but only if the facilitator can be trusted as neutral. The main skill here is restraint: the facilitator must keep the process alive without steering the content.
An unexpected issue: one facilitator had a legal background, which meant she used legal terminology and framing. The students immediately interpreted this as “interrogation” - and shut down. That was a useful lesson: even minor jargon can introduce a power dynamic that blocks openness.
Naive realism
Many students assumed that their own view was the obvious truth, and that people who disagreed were either uninformed or biased. This is classic naive realism. It showed up in subtle ways, like dismissing other answers as “just opinions” or assuming that disagreement meant that the other person “didn’t get it”. This is one of the biggest obstacles for belief-speaking: the inability to see the legitimacy of other people’s experiences.
Epistemic authority
The facilitator (and the school) is seen as the source of epistemic authority. This makes students look for the “correct answer”. Their belief about what is safe to say is guided by what they think we want to hear.
Interdemocracy is about learning to think and speak without constantly navigating external authority. For that to happen, the epistemic authority has to shift away from the facilitator and toward the group. The facilitator must explicitly state that there is no correct answer, and then repeatedly demonstrate it through their behavior.
Cognitive conditions in Interdemocracy
- The topic must be concrete and resonant.
- Participants must have personal experience.
- The question must be open and invitational, not evaluative.
- The setting must reduce performance anxiety.
- The facilitators must refrain from signaling a desired answer.